Starting from the semester exams due in December, Calcutta University’s undergraduate students will gain or lose marks over their attendance or lack of it.
Twenty marks will be set aside for internal assessment in every honours and pass paper, of which 10 will be for attendance while the remaining 10 will be based on internal tests in the colleges.
Students with less than 60 per cent attendance will be marked zero and cannot write the semester-end exams. Those with 60 to 74 per cent attendance will be awarded six out of 10 and those with 75 to 90 per cent, eight. A full 10 will be awarded to those who have attended more than 90 per cent of the classes in a semester.
Currently, every student is required to have 75 per cent attendance. Colleges can allow students with attendance between 60 and 74 per cent to write their exams, against a nominal fine, if they can explain their absence with documents such as medical certificates.
Those with less than 60 per cent attendance are even now barred from writing their exams but students often “befriend” a college clerk and ensure they make the cut. In several recent instances, students have launched protests and forced the authorities to be lenient.
The new exam norms, announced on Saturday, say a student’s answers in a pass paper will be evaluated by a teacher of the college (exam centre) where he wrote the exam.
Currently, the answer scripts for all honours and pass papers are taken to the university and are evaluated by university-appointed examiners.The principals of several colleges welcomed the decision on linking attendance to exam marks.
“A demand to be allowed to write an exam despite low attendance is illegitimate. This trend is expected to decline when students receive or lose marks over attendance,” the principal of a south Calcutta college said.
Some college principals, however, opposed the move of asking the external exam centre to evaluate the answers in pass papers, fearing for the “sanctity” of the exam if the college fails to protect the answer scripts.
